To keep this tutorial simple we’ll describe the quickest way to install the
engine. Note that we diverge from the recommended practice which keeps your data
separate from the binary distribution. For detailed installation instructions
please see Engine and Data Tool Installation for UNIX Variants.

Unzip the distribution

Get a command prompt inside the unzipped directory

Run bin/server.sh to start the engine

If you are not running on a UNIX variant then you can invoke Java directly.
See the contents of the server.sh script for details.

The output will look like this:

You can verify that the engine is running by pointing your web browser at
http://localhost:8090 which will display the following page.

The engine has a built-in web interface that you can use to test queries. To
access it go to the Applications tab and select the JSON application.

The JON application page looks like this:

You’ll see that the page is divided into four sections. The top left allows
you to use different web services; we’ll ignore this for now. The top right
tells you the current state of the page. The bottom left contains an editable
text area where you can enter your query and the bottom right contains the
results of the last executed query.

When the page first loads a default query template exists in the Request
section and the Response section contains the engine’s response when that
query runs against the engine.

Once you’ve entered the JSON tab out of the edit control or click outside of
it to perform the search. The Response section will show
actual engine response and a new Results section will appear above the
Request and Response with the data shown in a simple grid.

The web-based administration application is quite powerful. It can be used to
upload dimensions and changesets. It can also be used to
temporarily turn on or turn off pull-based dimensions and changeset feeds.

This page is used to configure feed sources (where the engine pulls the data
over HTTP) for dimensions and changeset XML data.

The checkpoint interval is how often any previously applied changesets are
squashed into a single checkpoint XML file. This is used to quickly
reset the engine’s state when it is restarted.

Note that any configuration changes made there take effect immediately but
are not stored in the discovery.properties file. All configuration changes made through the web
application are lost when the engine is shut down. The only way of making
persistent configuration changes is to edit the discovery.properties file in
the DISCOVERY_DIR.